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> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. Man, that's depressing.

shakezula 6y ago
It’s not tho! It means tighter release cycles which means a tighter feedback loop which means bands can find their sound faster and grow their backing faster.
oconnor663 6y ago
I think it could be depressing if we think of "your product" as "the most important part of what you do". But we could also think of it as "the thing that you need to make money from". If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!
- Hoasi 6y ago
  > If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing! It is, but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases. More production doesn't equal to more novelty.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Faster, smaller releases, compared to one new album every few years do not necessarily need to compromise on quality. It's rare that an album contains all gems.
  - ta1234567890 6y ago
    > but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better. There's a story about a ceramics professor that would divide his class in two at the beginning of the semester. He would grade one group by the quality of their best piece at the end of the semester and the other group by the weight of all the pieces produced during the whole semester. The professor said that invariably, the best pieces were produced by the people in the group that was graded by the weight of their pieces. His hypothesis was that people graded by the weight would produce a lot more pieces, so in the process they would also get really good at making the pieces, whereas the people graded by their best piece would just spend too much time on their pieces trying to make them perfect and wouldn't get enough practice to actually become better at making them.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      > Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better. That's true for engineering, but for music it only goes so far. A lot of musicians working this way will, after a while, find a formula that repeatedly sells, but loose a lot of originality in the process.
    - riversflow 6y ago
      I really like this anecdote, I find it very prescriptive for life, but I don’t think it applies. Professional musicians aren’t learning how to make music like the students of the ceramics class, they are mostly fully developed artists with their own artistic style and voice. I think that constantly producing art leads an artist to become a slave to his prior work, a sort of creative fatigue. In order to foster development of an artist’s voice, they need space to get away from that style and explore other styles and forms of art. Not a popular opinion here, but I really don’t think that coding is very comparable to pure art like music or painting, and I think that a lot of these ideas come from that place(that coding is art). Coding is art like electrical work is art—there is certainly a distinction between work crafted by a master and something muddled together by an amateur, but at the end of the day it’s functional. In these trades it’s perfectly okay to have creative fatigue as long as all the parts are good. If you have great variable names, nice modular form, terse functions, excellent descriptive comments, etc, its actually better if you have a monolithic unchanging form. Pure art, that is art meant to be consumed in the form its created, by contrast, brings with it all kinds of aesthetic values that are put by the way side in coding, and novelty and creativity are front and center.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    That's not the only argument that Ek is making. That's one of the aspects of the new economy... only a very small minority of artists can literally go dark for 3-4 years to write something that will rise to the top instantly.
  - tomphoolery 6y ago
    You don't necessarily have to "rush" for faster releases, you just have to think about releasing in a different way. Think of it like a software roadmap: Is it better to wait 6 months and release a bucket of features twice a year, or to release features gradually throughout the year and measure their effectiveness? Some might say that releasing features gradually is "rushing things out", while others might say that it's the only way to ship non-broken software that people actually want to use.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  Not if you’re coerced into having to produce a piece of music every month/couple of months to keep the machine running. That’s just producing a commodity. Some groups have got it together and are able to fund years of quiet work before releases, but no matter how much I enjoy creating I would hate to be so bound as outlined above.
  - chesterarthur 6y ago
    A lot of creative endeavors run on this timeline. It's just a shorter cycle and it's not new.
    - 52-6F-62 6y ago
      You’re right. It’s not new. Not for pop music anyway. I’d argue that it’s worse, though. Shorter cycles are even less healthy. And just because it’s been done before(-ish) and other endeavours run in this timeline doesn’t make it good or beneficial to anything but those who aspire to only make money off of it. The fact is, good music doesn’t require business to be good music. And the business doesn’t necessarily require the music to be good—it just requires that it directly or indirectly generates revenue. From the perspective of commerce the rest is incidental. Encouraging the commercial perspective over something more balanced is a net negative for culture and society. At least I think so.
  - guyzero 6y ago
    I am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of work. https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramics-class-and-quantity-before-quality/ https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic... It turns out that the students who were just churning out pots ended up making the pots that were ultimately better. I think there's probably something to be said for constantly creating.
    - e1g 6y ago
      Just FYI this story originally was about photography as clarified by the author at https://jamesclear.com/repetitions https://jamesclear.com/repetitions In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate to me playing the violin, dancing ballet, or writing a song.
- mellow2020 6y ago
  > When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed, rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I dunno. I've known a few people who dreamed of being in a band, and they weren't excited about the part where they sit at a desk revising lyrics; they were excited to perform their songs, to get up in front of a crowd and have everyone hear them.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  That’s the classic line between a performer alone and a songwriter.
gwd 6y ago
>> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. > Man, that's depressing. If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?
- singhrac 6y ago
  It's not comparable - music is art.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    The implication in your comment is that code isn't art, when code absolutely can be art. Functional things can be artistically beautiful too.
    - Juliate 6y ago
      Plus the implication that music might not be a tool for a specific purpose (which it is also absolutely in some contexts). The thing is that "music", is not "one thing". It all depends on the purpose, if there is one, and on the intention of the composer and of the players and of the audience. Here, Spotify's CEO adresses a very specific market in the music industry, not "musicians" per se.
    - bmitc 6y ago
      This is a really silly argument. There is an art to building software, no doubt, in terms of it being a craft. But I think you've misspoken about functional things being artistically beautiful. What you really should mean is that functional things can be aesthetically beautiful, which is true and different. Art is primarily defined by expression and exploration, particularly revolving around human emotions. Software products, in the end, do not fit this category. There is a vast difference. Edit: I defined it elsewhere a bit smoother. I define art as the exploration of emotional expression. Art products are the end result of that exploration. Live acts or art or performances could be viewed as a sort of merger between the two, either as a reenactment of the exploration or as a new exploration happening in the moment.
kkhire 6y ago
not really considering artists can actually get paid now
- Barrin92 6y ago
  in exchange for not being artists, ironically. If you instrumentalize music to maximise your influencer career with the content of the music as an afterthought what you get isn't art but a mediocre commodity. It's like Ricky Gervais remark at the Globes, the actors aren't actually actors any more, it's a competition for the best looking, most ripped steroid junkie.
Juliate 6y ago
That's not depressing. That's one part of the "music industry". It's a huge sales channel, per se. Now, being a musician or an artist, you decide what you do with it. If you consider that what matters is your sales and nothing else, Spotify's stance might apply to you. But you might have different point of view as well, still make music, and still live from it, perhaps.
- bmitc 6y ago
  It's a bit disrespectful to reply to someone saying something's depressing by bluntly saying it's not. It's not up to you to judge what they find depressing. I also find it depressing. It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology. We see it everywhere from the STEM myth to arts educational programs and artists struggling just to survive. Even earning my living in science and technology, I personally have grown to believe art is far more important for human progress and development than science and technology. It's a real problem that we blindly let markets decide what is important because it is in fact humanity's lack of progress emotionally, which is unfortunately tied strongly to our biology, but our insane progress in technology that causes almost all of our problems.
  - nullspace 6y ago
    I think I vaguely agree with much of what you said, but just want to point this one out. > It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology. Want to give a couple of examples against this: - some of the most valuable software out there is free and open source. The authors of said software don’t get compensated anywhere near the softwares value. Coz everyone uses it for free. - I very much value the games I play on my iPhone, but I have never paid any money for them. - I will buy Opeth t-shirts, and Akerfeld custom guitars, but I’m never going to give Spotify as much money. So, I don’t think your claim is so clear cut as you state it.
  - Juliate 6y ago
    Huh? Someone's saying "that's depressing" is a statement. It's not "I find this depressing" or "I'm depressed by that". It's not disrespect, it's bringing a different perspective that does not see the depression there. I don't find this depressing. I don't even find this societal at all. What would be depressing would be to take Spotify's view of "what music should be" or "how musicians should work/behave" for a relevant, world-wide truth. When it is only a very specific, skewed and biased take by someone's who's got a direct interest into making people believe that it is the only way to go. That many people go this way does not mean they are right, neither they are winning.
hammock 6y ago
It's the same for fine art honestly
- jontro 6y ago
  Also for open source projects
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
shoulderfake 6y ago
Well this is only true if your music is good. You can release till the cows come home, if the music sucks nobody will buy anything from you
afterburner 6y ago
And the most common business tactic for content creators is to gain a loyal following and milk them forever.
JJMcJ 6y ago
This is more a reflection of the royalty structure for recorded music than anything else.
hoorayimhelping 6y ago
It's also not universally true. Some of Steve Albini's interviews are really on point with regards to this stuff. Really worth listening to if nothing more than to provide contrast to comments like the one above (which seem pretty reductive and flippant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAc3hx5pok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAc3hx5pok
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
It's amazing, not depressing. Music is an incredibly effective marketing channel.
vlunkr 6y ago
I think it's just inaccurate. People go to shows to hear the music, therefore the music is the product still.
mxcrossb 6y ago
Especially when Spotify is telling you this because they pay you so little for streaming rights.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
abhayhegde 6y ago
It truly boggles me how much does one person have to produce in order to gain the same magnitude of fame, back in the days of middle 19th century.

shakezula 6y ago

It’s not tho! It means tighter release cycles which means a tighter feedback loop which means bands can find their sound faster and grow their backing faster.

oconnor663 6y ago

I think it could be depressing if we think of "your product" as "the most important part of what you do". But we could also think of it as "the thing that you need to make money from". If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!

Hoasi 6y ago
> If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing! It is, but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases. More production doesn't equal to more novelty.
- vkou 6y ago
  Faster, smaller releases, compared to one new album every few years do not necessarily need to compromise on quality. It's rare that an album contains all gems.
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  > but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better. There's a story about a ceramics professor that would divide his class in two at the beginning of the semester. He would grade one group by the quality of their best piece at the end of the semester and the other group by the weight of all the pieces produced during the whole semester. The professor said that invariably, the best pieces were produced by the people in the group that was graded by the weight of their pieces. His hypothesis was that people graded by the weight would produce a lot more pieces, so in the process they would also get really good at making the pieces, whereas the people graded by their best piece would just spend too much time on their pieces trying to make them perfect and wouldn't get enough practice to actually become better at making them.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    > Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better. That's true for engineering, but for music it only goes so far. A lot of musicians working this way will, after a while, find a formula that repeatedly sells, but loose a lot of originality in the process.
  - riversflow 6y ago
    I really like this anecdote, I find it very prescriptive for life, but I don’t think it applies. Professional musicians aren’t learning how to make music like the students of the ceramics class, they are mostly fully developed artists with their own artistic style and voice. I think that constantly producing art leads an artist to become a slave to his prior work, a sort of creative fatigue. In order to foster development of an artist’s voice, they need space to get away from that style and explore other styles and forms of art. Not a popular opinion here, but I really don’t think that coding is very comparable to pure art like music or painting, and I think that a lot of these ideas come from that place(that coding is art). Coding is art like electrical work is art—there is certainly a distinction between work crafted by a master and something muddled together by an amateur, but at the end of the day it’s functional. In these trades it’s perfectly okay to have creative fatigue as long as all the parts are good. If you have great variable names, nice modular form, terse functions, excellent descriptive comments, etc, its actually better if you have a monolithic unchanging form. Pure art, that is art meant to be consumed in the form its created, by contrast, brings with it all kinds of aesthetic values that are put by the way side in coding, and novelty and creativity are front and center.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  That's not the only argument that Ek is making. That's one of the aspects of the new economy... only a very small minority of artists can literally go dark for 3-4 years to write something that will rise to the top instantly.
- tomphoolery 6y ago
  You don't necessarily have to "rush" for faster releases, you just have to think about releasing in a different way. Think of it like a software roadmap: Is it better to wait 6 months and release a bucket of features twice a year, or to release features gradually throughout the year and measure their effectiveness? Some might say that releasing features gradually is "rushing things out", while others might say that it's the only way to ship non-broken software that people actually want to use.
52-6F-62 6y ago
Not if you’re coerced into having to produce a piece of music every month/couple of months to keep the machine running. That’s just producing a commodity. Some groups have got it together and are able to fund years of quiet work before releases, but no matter how much I enjoy creating I would hate to be so bound as outlined above.
- chesterarthur 6y ago
  A lot of creative endeavors run on this timeline. It's just a shorter cycle and it's not new.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    You’re right. It’s not new. Not for pop music anyway. I’d argue that it’s worse, though. Shorter cycles are even less healthy. And just because it’s been done before(-ish) and other endeavours run in this timeline doesn’t make it good or beneficial to anything but those who aspire to only make money off of it. The fact is, good music doesn’t require business to be good music. And the business doesn’t necessarily require the music to be good—it just requires that it directly or indirectly generates revenue. From the perspective of commerce the rest is incidental. Encouraging the commercial perspective over something more balanced is a net negative for culture and society. At least I think so.
- guyzero 6y ago
  I am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of work. https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramics-class-and-quantity-before-quality/ https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic... It turns out that the students who were just churning out pots ended up making the pots that were ultimately better. I think there's probably something to be said for constantly creating.
  - e1g 6y ago
    Just FYI this story originally was about photography as clarified by the author at https://jamesclear.com/repetitions https://jamesclear.com/repetitions In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate to me playing the violin, dancing ballet, or writing a song.
mellow2020 6y ago
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed, rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I dunno. I've known a few people who dreamed of being in a band, and they weren't excited about the part where they sit at a desk revising lyrics; they were excited to perform their songs, to get up in front of a crowd and have everyone hear them.

52-6F-62 6y ago
That’s the classic line between a performer alone and a songwriter.

gwd 6y ago

>> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. > Man, that's depressing. If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?

singhrac 6y ago
It's not comparable - music is art.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  The implication in your comment is that code isn't art, when code absolutely can be art. Functional things can be artistically beautiful too.
  - Juliate 6y ago
    Plus the implication that music might not be a tool for a specific purpose (which it is also absolutely in some contexts). The thing is that "music", is not "one thing". It all depends on the purpose, if there is one, and on the intention of the composer and of the players and of the audience. Here, Spotify's CEO adresses a very specific market in the music industry, not "musicians" per se.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    This is a really silly argument. There is an art to building software, no doubt, in terms of it being a craft. But I think you've misspoken about functional things being artistically beautiful. What you really should mean is that functional things can be aesthetically beautiful, which is true and different. Art is primarily defined by expression and exploration, particularly revolving around human emotions. Software products, in the end, do not fit this category. There is a vast difference. Edit: I defined it elsewhere a bit smoother. I define art as the exploration of emotional expression. Art products are the end result of that exploration. Live acts or art or performances could be viewed as a sort of merger between the two, either as a reenactment of the exploration or as a new exploration happening in the moment.

kkhire 6y ago

not really considering artists can actually get paid now

Barrin92 6y ago
in exchange for not being artists, ironically. If you instrumentalize music to maximise your influencer career with the content of the music as an afterthought what you get isn't art but a mediocre commodity. It's like Ricky Gervais remark at the Globes, the actors aren't actually actors any more, it's a competition for the best looking, most ripped steroid junkie.

Juliate 6y ago

That's not depressing. That's one part of the "music industry". It's a huge sales channel, per se. Now, being a musician or an artist, you decide what you do with it. If you consider that what matters is your sales and nothing else, Spotify's stance might apply to you. But you might have different point of view as well, still make music, and still live from it, perhaps.

bmitc 6y ago
It's a bit disrespectful to reply to someone saying something's depressing by bluntly saying it's not. It's not up to you to judge what they find depressing. I also find it depressing. It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology. We see it everywhere from the STEM myth to arts educational programs and artists struggling just to survive. Even earning my living in science and technology, I personally have grown to believe art is far more important for human progress and development than science and technology. It's a real problem that we blindly let markets decide what is important because it is in fact humanity's lack of progress emotionally, which is unfortunately tied strongly to our biology, but our insane progress in technology that causes almost all of our problems.
- nullspace 6y ago
  I think I vaguely agree with much of what you said, but just want to point this one out. > It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology. Want to give a couple of examples against this: - some of the most valuable software out there is free and open source. The authors of said software don’t get compensated anywhere near the softwares value. Coz everyone uses it for free. - I very much value the games I play on my iPhone, but I have never paid any money for them. - I will buy Opeth t-shirts, and Akerfeld custom guitars, but I’m never going to give Spotify as much money. So, I don’t think your claim is so clear cut as you state it.
- Juliate 6y ago
  Huh? Someone's saying "that's depressing" is a statement. It's not "I find this depressing" or "I'm depressed by that". It's not disrespect, it's bringing a different perspective that does not see the depression there. I don't find this depressing. I don't even find this societal at all. What would be depressing would be to take Spotify's view of "what music should be" or "how musicians should work/behave" for a relevant, world-wide truth. When it is only a very specific, skewed and biased take by someone's who's got a direct interest into making people believe that it is the only way to go. That many people go this way does not mean they are right, neither they are winning.

hammock 6y ago

It's the same for fine art honestly

jontro 6y ago
Also for open source projects

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

shoulderfake 6y ago

Well this is only true if your music is good. You can release till the cows come home, if the music sucks nobody will buy anything from you

afterburner 6y ago

And the most common business tactic for content creators is to gain a loyal following and milk them forever.

JJMcJ 6y ago

This is more a reflection of the royalty structure for recorded music than anything else.

hoorayimhelping 6y ago

It's also not universally true. Some of Steve Albini's interviews are really on point with regards to this stuff. Really worth listening to if nothing more than to provide contrast to comments like the one above (which seem pretty reductive and flippant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAc3hx5pok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAc3hx5pok

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

It's amazing, not depressing. Music is an incredibly effective marketing channel.

vlunkr 6y ago

I think it's just inaccurate. People go to shows to hear the music, therefore the music is the product still.

mxcrossb 6y ago

Especially when Spotify is telling you this because they pay you so little for streaming rights.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

abhayhegde 6y ago

It truly boggles me how much does one person have to produce in order to gain the same magnitude of fame, back in the days of middle 19th century.